The Contemporary Genesis

[PUBLISHER’S
NOTE.—This chapter was revised since the publication of the original French
edition of the History of Art, and will appear only in the definitive edition
in French. We thank M. Élie Faure and M. Georges Crès, his publisher, for having
authorized us to reproduce the new version from the manuscript.]

IF the
work of Cézanne did not interpret with singular power a thoroughly general
desire that was willed by our character, it would not have suddenly gained that
ascendancy which has gone beyond the borders of France and has brought Europe
flowing back to it, in quest of a new intellectual order. While the fugitive
impression and the fact without commentary were establishing around him the
endless and yet so quickly exhausted motif of literature and of painting, his
work suddenly appeared like a refuge, coarsely but solidly built, and glowing
with its somber harmony, in which the artist could find the elements of new
generalizations, and through which he was constrained to pass. It presented so
radical a type of opposition to Impressionism that it was but natural that men
should try to condemn, in the name of Cézanne, that movement of purification
and of research which was so necessary for us. This is the usual rise and fall
of the balance between action and reaction. In reality, the work of the master
of Aix continued, completed, and terminated Impressionism, and reassembled, in
view of a new construction, the materials which it had selected and
contributed.

The
work of Paul Cézanne was even confused for a long time with that of the masters
of Impressionism. He occupied a secondary place in the group, standing a little
in the background, between Guillaumin and the charming Berthe Morizot. That was
quite natural. He was of their age. He had become their companion during their
trying times. He exhibited with them. The public linked him with them in its
censure, although he was already in advance of them, and although the
Philistines of 1875, who condemned Claude Monet in the name of Delacroix or of
Courbet, could not foresee that the Philistines of 1900 would condemn Paul
Cézanne in the name of Claude Monet. He had made the acquaintance of the
founders of the group about 1862, when he met, at the atelier Suisse, the fiery
Pissarro, who initiated him into Courbet 's painting. Zola, his companion from
childhood, took him to Manet's studio. His tense and fierce sensibility loved
the independent nature of his new friends, their passionate ardor, and the
power of enthusiasm revealed by their words. He followed them to
Auvers-sur-Oise, where they revealed to him the play of reflections on
surfaces, where he watched with them the passage of the wind over the water,
the eternal undulation of the leaves, and the shadow which the clouds carry
over the soil and over the red roofs of the houses, and through the tremble of
the flowering apple trees and cherry trees. To them, in spite of his education
and habit, he was indebted for the clean eye, the probity of intelligence, and
the original and unknown power of his blood. With their aid he shook off the
influences which had been tyrannizing over him for fifteen years: Courbet, then
Daumier, then Delacroix, then, though less had been seen of his work, Corot;
then, working backward over the traces of their souls, Rubens, Veronese, and
Michael Angelo. To his friends he was indebted for the laboriously and slowly
gained freedom from the despotic seduction of the great works, the freedom to
consider the heroes of painting not as guides whom one is in duty bound to
follow, but as witnesses whom one has the right to invoke. When he returned to
Aix-en-Provence in 1879, he was still far from perceiving in himself the
regular and powerful beat of the unknown rhythms which he brought to us later.
But he had at least a pure, high-keyed palette, and the moving face of the
world impressed upon his sensibility its most fleeting and living images, those
freest from literary or sentimental interpretation. That was what he owed to
Claude Monet and to Pissarro. And he never forgot it.

It was
at Aix itself that he was born, forty years before. It was at Aix that he had
lived a studious and wild childhood, that he had learned from Vergil the love
of the classic soil and of measure in art; there, with the young Zola, he had
spent the days of his vacations, like a little faun drunk with sunlight and
cool water, spending nights in the depths of the woods, and the burning hours
in the rivers, drying his sunburnt skin in the eternal wind which, through the
corridor of the Rhone, whirls the dust of the roads and the pulverized marble
of the circuses and the aqueducts. When he returned there, he was alone. No
more pagan illusions, no more friends. His art at the time was a weapon which
shone, certainly, but which he handles unskillfully. Around him was
indifference, slander, folly, prejudice, and a total lack of comprehension of
what he was, of what he desired, and of the torturing sensibility which drove
him to take refuge in himself, to avoid unknown faces, and to flee the
obligatory conversations and visits which make up three quarters of the
provincial adventure. This wild, badly dressed man, who lived on his income and
who painted, was certainly a lunatic. People spoke of him with severity. He was
ridiculous, besides, clean, to be sure, but with spots on his coat; and his red
nose, his watery eyes, his small twisted beard, and the impression he gave of
being hunted set the whole pack of street boys upon him. The poor loved him,
for he had an open hand. But no one took him seriously. Certain people
exploited him. And moreover, as he did not wish anyone to "get his
hooks" into him, he drew back into himself, like life when it is so
sensitive that every hostile or rough shock from without wounds to its depths.

He
suffered. No one knew that. He held out until the end. He could have lived in
Paris, and found friends and admirers, and their encouragement. He did not wish
to. He shut himself up in his strength, fixed his inner images, and around him,
sought that which confirmed them. Sometimes he returned to Paris, where he
passed three quarters of his time in the Louvre of Veronese, of Courbet, and of
Rubens. He made two or three short sojourns in Flanders and Holland. He desired
to know nothing of Italy, as if he had feared that contact with the great works
which attracted him above all others, would corrupt his growing resolve to
reach his own ideas. And that is all. When he regained his native soil, the
history of his life was ended. That of his mind was opening.

Those
landscapes of Provence, bare and rigid, those red lands sown with thin trees
and rising toward the rocky hills whose profile against the dark sky is so
pure, and that reddening gold which bathes them at twilight without veiling
their fixed lines, were very soon to furnish him with the elements of a plastic
vision which he would perhaps never have discovered in the heavily watered
luxuriance of the valleys of the north. In Provence the houses pile up like
stones, the leaves do not conceal them, the angles of the roofs and the walls
cut from the light geometrical figures which bring the mind naturally to
simplifications for which it finds reason in the dry, hard bareness of the
rocks which bar the horizon, of the sky which is generally without clouds, and
of the trunks stripped of leaves which shoot up straight and clean, cutting
through space at regular intervals. From no other place could he have drawn
more naturally the desire for a sober form, shorn of ornaments, of puffery, and
of incident, a form firmly based upon the soil, heavy, deep rooted, and reduced
to those masses alone and those lines alone which define its relationships.
Each time that he found himself in the presence of a bare wall, of a road, of a
motionless pond surrounded by stone bluffs, or a vast space described by the
granite chain of the mountains of the country—something straight, rigorous, and
categorical —he held the central motive of the poem of color which floated in
his inner vision, and which he was ceaselessly seeking to confront with the
nature of the senses, in order to justify it and to build it. The houses, the
roads, and the hills of Provence brought to the massive lyricism of the painter
the monotonous, but compact, sonorous and full rhythm in which his summary
phrase voluntarily inclosed itself in order to express the ordered conception
which he had of the world. It was as if great verses were unrolling with force,
laden with mind, hard with condensed matter, and moving with a powerful swing
to strike the rhyme, as if to cause the image to penetrate more profoundly by
keeping it at the summits of memory and sensation alone.

The
unfinished appearance of Cezanne's canvases gives to those who have not a
rounded understanding of his thought, the impression of an incomplete nature,
limiting itself to taking notes of the world, which are essential, doubtless,
but summary, und instinctively seized on the wing. Each one, in reality,
represents enormous work, and a spiritualization, progressively and laboriously
obtained, of exactly those sensuous elements which constitute the origin of all
his painting. He was wont to say that all the forms in nature may be reduced to
the cone, to the cylinder, and to the sphere, and this saying has had its
victims. At bottom, it was only a symbolic manner of expressing the final
appearance which the forms tended to assume in an abstract universe, whose
imaginary limits he took good care not to overstep, when he had the palette in
his left hand and the brush in his right. His imagination, quite unsuited to
extend itself over surface, however weakly, developed its power when he treated
the question of depth. Never has there been an artist less capable than he of
inventing and combining figures. of finding in the myth, the event of daily
life, or the personal dream, a pretext for exalting and transforming the
images. The Spaniards themselves, Velasquez, Zurbarán and Greco—not to speak of
Goya, a satanic poet of lust and of death—and perhaps the Hollanders, knew less
badly than he how to transport the immediate, outer world into an imaginary
world. He seemed to copy what he saw, he tried to recover that innocence of the
first ages of life during which curiosity awakens —it is that innocence which,
with the man who knows much, having thought much and suffered much, borrows the
language of the most self-conscious will in order to assume the majesty and the
power of the law, stripped of all commentary. His candor was a victory. His
impotence to imagine assumed singular appearances, which would awaken doubt of
his power of creation if the plastic quality of his work, comparable with that
of the greatest, were not there to reassure us. In illustrated books, in the
History of Charles Blanc, in the Magasinpittoresque, and even in fashion
journals, he hunted up external silhouettes which he enlarged and colored like
a child, incapable of inventing a gesture or an attitude which should combine
harmoniously with the attitudes and the gestures round about. He did not
invent, he could not invent. It was only "from the motif" that he
knew how to abstract and to simplify—to the ultimate limit of abstraction and
simplification, remaining uniquely, and despite everything, a painter and
nothing but a painter, perhaps, in truth, the most intense, and the most
completely bound up with the matter of which things are made, that ever
existed.

The
universe, in fact, is for him only a pretext for holding, within an
architecture reduced to its soberest, but also solidest, expression, a matter
magnificent and dense, in which the rocks which pierce the crust of the earth
seem to have been pulverized in order to harden, unite, and condense the red
soil, the dark foliage, the thick azure, and the lusterless seas of the
Mediterranean countries. He took as his pretext the great denuded landscapes,
the figures encountered at random on the road, among the people around him, and
at the inns of the country—peasants, children, card players around a rough
table, women in old-fashioned house dresses, or else those round, heavy fruits
which he would throw down on the table amid the unwashed glasses and the
half-filled wine bottles. Whatever he painted, he knew well that in starting
out from the sumptuous materials with their dark splendor which he drew from
one aspect of life as well as another, and in never losing sight of the great,
summary lines between which he perceived them, he would gradually succeed in
giving to his form the most powerful volume, and in making it turn in space
like those geometrical figures which expressed in spiritualized language the
directions of his glance. "When color attains its richness," he used
to say, "form attains its plenitude" [Cited by Emile Bernard]. The
one met the other halfway, sought it out, and defined it little by little, in
the measure that it gained in opulence, in somber light, and in heavy maturity.
The tone appeared to him like an actual secretion of the form, which itself
appeared to him like a gradation of the tone. . . I imagine that in the depths
of the silent hearts of the old sculptors of the Middle Empire of Egypt, those
who erected the statues, dense, and defined by receding planes, and who saturated
the compact grain of their granite with indigo, red ochre, and with emerald,
there must have trembled something of the brief fervor followed by the
restlessness of despair which beat in Cezanne's heart when, after weeks of
exhausting effort, he had been able to wrest from mystery one of those somber
harmonies, as much a thing of architecture as a temple, which have revealed
painting to those worthy of loving it.

In
nature, there is for him no other "subject" than the plane. It is but
of little importance that the object be exactly followed in all its contours
and finished in all its details. That which is necessary is, that it be in its
place in the depth of space as regards the other objects, that, at the same
time, the gradations of its edges give it its own existence, and that the
object, in relation to the world, and the world in relation to the object,
possess complete solidarity. He leaves to those who will come after him the
care of polishing the phrase, of rounding the period, and of animating the
recital. He put the straight or curved surfaces in their place, like a mason,
whose hands are rough, but whose mind is made up of the sense of balance he has
acquired, of the calm of his will, and of subtlety. His landscapes have the
appearance of a section of the planet seen from a far distance, stripped of its
local life, and reduced simply to the essential masses which define its
construction. His personages are placed like living statues, frequently awkward
and ill squared, but forcefully defined by sustained planes and by profiles
whose clearness is uninterrupted by any useless accidental. His still-lifes
have the splendor of the heaps of fruit which concentrate into themselves the
whole of surrounding life, and which seem to send forth their full and
spherical form and their color in its saturation, from the innermost center of
their matter. The most immediate and the most material sensation, which is
always present with him, is ever carried by the mind of the painter to its
maximum of severity, of purity, and of comprehension.

"I
remain," wrote Cézanne at the decline of his career, "I remain the
primitive of the road which I have discovered" [Emile Bernard]. "The
archaic," he might have said. There is in the work of this master an
impersonal and general character very different from the spirit of minutiae
manifested by the primitives, and this quality of Cezanne's gives to his work a
sense whose importance he himself never suspected. As primitivism announces the
advent in history of the individual, archaism is at the beginning of the great
collective rhythms. . . Whenever one of his pictures of former years was
presented to Cézanne, he did not wish to see it and, in his own mind, judged
very severely those who liked such things. He forgot his canvases as soon as
they had left him. They lay about everywhere, under cupboards and behind
furniture; they were used to wipe the stove and the floor. A childhood game of
his son's was cutting out the windows and the doors in them. He sometimes
abandoned them in the open fields. He rarely signed them. Like all the great
anonymous men, he expressed a kind of social need, going beyond the individual
in order to erect one of those grand essays of rudimentary architecture which
announce in society a unanimous movement of concentration in depth. He went
regularly to church. A sincere Catholic, fleeing the priest and the bigot, he
was evidently seeking in the past the shelter of one of those imposing social
structures which he did not find in the present and did not suspect in the
future. There is nothing less sentimental and less moral than his work. There
is no anecdote; no thought of pleasing or of interesting. It is a pure
metaphysical monument, and the materials with which it is built and which make
it perceptible to the senses are the most thoroughly tested and chosen, but
also the most summarily cut, in the world. Even when he tries to compose, as in
those extraordinary gatherings of nude personages where, visibly haunted by the
memory of Poussin, he makes an awkward attempt, amid the great choir of the
trees, of the vast sky, and the running waters, to build up a broad sensual
melody, even then he is absolutely free of any kind of psychological or
literary intention. And even then, his classicism, that need for order and for
measure which had been pursuing him since childhood, is unaware of its own
significance. He, the provincial, the Catholic, is in accord with the secret
rhythm of his century; he is urged on toward the unknown organism hesitating on
the threshold, by profound forces of which he is no more conscious than were
the masons of the last Romanesque churches whose nave was suddenly to leap,
lighten, elongate, and hover like a wing, with the generation which was
arising. A lofty and lucid intelligence, as long as there is question of
building with the incomparable material which the generosity of his nature
permitted him to discover and to isolate in the world, he is, even so,
surpassed by the grandeur of his influence. And it is for that reason that this
influence cannot be exhausted save by the realization of the organism awaited.

The end
of this great man is well known. He took sick one day when he was working in
the country to arrest upon a canvas the inexhaustible movement which was
revealing to him, by its perpetuity and its constancy, certain concordant
directions and certain eternal aspects. He expired two days afterward, and no
one, outside of a few dozen artists, knew of it. And this was well. He had
always disdained homage and despised those who abase themselves in order to
surprise it or to force it. He had desired that solitary life which, to the
end, he protected, against the assaults of fools, by outbursts of noble and
savage modesty, for which no one understood the necessity and the reason. The
shadow which hovers around us from the time when we are forty years old, did
not, even if it grazed his heart, turn him away from a mission whose importance
he felt, and neither did his tardy and restricted, but so lofty, renown turn
him away from it. He knew himself to be the greatest painter in Europe. When
one has that power within one, one may go forward alone.